My response to Larry’s comment
It seems to me, Larry, that it's more normal for a large RV conglomerate to buy out a smallish RV company, and when that happens, there are two things you can bet on: the prices will go up, and the quality will go down.
It appears that many old RV companies were founded by individuals who enjoyed camping and sought to create a better RV. And did. he was proud of his RVs and built the best ones he could, while still making a profit. But he gets old, has a couple of cataract operations, has to pee every 30 minutes, spends most of his waking hours trying to remember if he took his heart medicine, blood pressure medicine, blood thinner, and cholesterol pill, or not, and gets a hankering to retire.
Then along comes a multibillion-dollar RV company and offers him enough money to comfortably retire with a mansion on the beach in Naples, Florida. He says, "SHOW ME THE MONEY !!! " and he's out the door.
The aforementioned billion-dollar RV company, which owns 15 other RV companies, eliminates half of its seasoned, experienced staff and replaces them with undocumented workers who will work for half the price. Then, along with other cost-cutting measures, quality goes out the window.
That's the normal progression of things, so it's unusual to hear about small companies acquiring pieces of a larger one. However, due to the bat flu and RVs becoming a popular way to live and travel, stranger things have happened.
But I'm happy with the Lance, I believe I've gone through the normal progression of RVs. I started with small ones and slowly worked my way up to the Arctic Fox, which was way bigger than I needed. I didn't know it at the time, and when I came to my senses, I went back to a small, easy-to-deal-with, not fussy, lightweight, and easy-to-keep-on-the-road Lance truck camper. And as an added bonus, it's small enough that they can bury me in it.
Theboondork
Eleven Mile Reservoir, 39 mile mountains in the background.
Country boys having fun. Shooting and hunting are popular sports in this area, and many of the folks participate in these activities. In fact in Woodland Park where I used to live in the mountains, hunting was so important, not just as a sport but a way to feed your family, that the high school kids, and yes there were girls to, were allowed to carry their hunting guns in their truck during hunting season because the kids might be coming from hunting in the morning, and going directly to school, or going hunting when they left school in the afternoon. There were trucks in the high school parking lot with rifles, large-caliber handguns, and even archery equipment, depending on what they used for hunting…. And as the Hank Williams Junior song says, a country boy can survive.
I put three kids through that high school, and amazingly enough, the kids didn't shoot each other. And the guns themselves didn't crawl out of the truck, slither across the parking lot, and into the high school and start shooting people on their own. So it appeared that the ease and availability of a gun had nothing to do with people getting shot and everything to do with the people themselves.... Maybe we’re not raising our kids the right way anymore.